The latter scenario is where the Movement found itself 99 years ago, the last time the Olympic Games were staged in the French capital.

It had already pulled off a miracle by laying on a Games in the warzone in Antwerp less than two years after the guns had fallen silent.

But that was a reflex; an almost instinctive assertion that the war to end all wars had not ended Pierre de Coubertin’s late-19th-century Olympic revival.

In the subsequent four years the great powers and their chastened populations had had time to take stock and contemplate the role that the still relatively new-fangled concept of international sport might play in a new world still reeling from its savage lesson to end all lessons.

The answer, as the clock ticked down towards the Games of the Eighth Olympiad in Europe’s most captivating capital city, appeared to be "a very significant role".

The New York Times, no less, had a stab at articulating the zeitgeist in a big Sunday spread in April 1924, a few weeks before the start of the action at the brand-new Colombes stadium.

"Not since the beginning of time," the US newspaper proclaimed, "has sport taken so great a hold on the imagination of all nations".

It went on: "Observers say the world has entered a golden age of athletics, partly in reaction from the tragic strain of the great war.

"Philosophers say the peoples of the earth may yet be drawn into accord through the common bond of sport."

How Thomas Bach, the present International Olympic Committee (IOC) President, would love to be reading an updated rendering of such sentiments in April 2024.

Of course, the "common bond of sport" at this point still excluded Germany.

As David Miller wrote in his Official History of the Olympic Games and the IOC, "With his ingrained idealism/blindness, de Coubertin campaigned for the inclusion of the German team for Paris but was unable to persuade his unsurprisingly embittered colleagues".

What actually happened was that the Games, remembered chiefly for Finnish runner Paavo Nurmi’s achievement of winning five gold medals, became a vehicle for growing nationalism.

Reading through contemporary accounts from a range of sports including rugby union, boxing, fencing, tennis and aquatics, one forms the impression that some of the frowned-upon incidents would have elicited little comment today.

Nonetheless, by the end of the Games, a storm was ready to break.

Some of the fiercest criticism was published in The Times, voice of the British establishment, and widely disseminated elsewhere.

The Times’s commentary was picked up, for example, in a piece in the Belfast Telegraph under the portentous headline, "Last Olympic Games?"

"No intelligent person of any nationality can possibly have watched the course of events in the present Olympiad without being convinced that nothing has been generated except international ill-will," it began.

"We have watched and seen only the intensification of national enmities…

"The dreadful thing is that the outbreaks, uproars, quarrels and what-not have not been the actions of a body of sportsmen directed against an individual for some infringement of the sporting code, but they have been demonstrations of national ill-will growing out of political considerations with which sport has had nothing to do.

"The sum total is deplorable.

"Judged by the only standard, which is worth judging by, namely, their effect on the goodwill of the world, the Olympic Games of 1924 are a grievous failure."

Though nowhere near as strong in its criticism, the New York Times acknowledged that "from the first to the last the national idea predominated”, adding that it was only rarely - as when Finland's marathon winner Albin Stenroos entered the Olympic stadium - that spectators "touched the real Olympic moment...

"It must be admitted that the atmosphere was often reverse to that which the revival of the games has sought to create," the newspaper said.

Frantz Reichel, general secretary of the French Olympic Committee, told the Associated Press that spectators should be educated not to show animosity.

But he also argued that the "elimination of all events from the Olympic programme which cannot be decided by either time, distance or weight, or which the judges have to decide through an interpretation of the rules or according to established formulas, would go a long way toward creating a better atmosphere".

De Coubertin, for his part, insisted that the Games had been a "power for good" since their renewal.

If he became convinced that they bred discord and animosity among nations, the French baron asserted, "I would recommend that they be abandoned".

Almost a century on, it seems to me that expectations of what international sport might be capable of were perhaps pitched a tad too high – understandably given the passionate desire to avoid another charnel house in Europe.

The passage of time has encouraged a less hubristic, but no doubt more realistic take: international sport is one of many human innovations, big and small, that probably do better than harm - and more power to it for that.